Las Vegas-based medical device startup finds ‘holy grail’

A medical device startup with a lab in Las Vegas has developed a previously elusive method of blood pressure monitoring.

Vena Vitals, which launched out of the University of California, Irvine, and is incubating at Roseman Bioventures, makes a wearable device that monitors blood pressure continuously.

“This is considered a holy grail,” said Vena Vitals co-founder and CEO Ray Liu, who has lived in Las Vegas for 13 years. “There’s been no shortage of attempts at this space.

“Instead of the cuff that gives you only snapshots in time, we’re able to track real time changes in blood pressure that can be used in a number of different applications.”

The wearable device consists of a soft, stretchable sensor, which is encapsulated in a small sticker.

“That is really where the magic happens, where we detect any changes in the pulse pressure and we translate that to blood pressure,” Liu said. “But we also have the electronics module that sends data wirelessly, via Bluetooth, to your phone or your tablet so you’re able to track it. It’s basically just an app.”

Those two pieces come together as a strap on the wrist or foot, and Vena Vitals also is developing devices for other areas of the body.

“It works anywhere you can feel your pulse,” Liu said. “We have other form factors we’re working on that go on your digital artery on your finger. We also have one for your temporal artery, which is on the front of your ear. We could also build it in the frame of smart glasses.”

The company, which has 15 employees between its labs in Las Vegas and Irvine, California, is on the cusp of starting clinical trials at UMC and hopes to get FDA approval this year to sell the device.

“It’s hard to predict because the FDA is backed up quite a lot. But it should be soon. We’re hoping within the next few months,” Liu said. “The technology is important because blood pressure is one of our most important vital signs and one of the most difficult to track.”

Vena Vitals already has conducted clinical studies at about eight other hospitals nationwide.

“We’ve collected a lot of data already, about 600 patients across the country,” Liu said. “And we show really, really strong clinical data. That’s one of the key advantages that we have.”

‘That’s the dream’

The company has been working in a lab on Roseman University’s campus in Summerlin for the last two years after it was recruited to Southern Nevada by the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance and the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development, and received investment from Desert Forge Ventures.

“Vena Vitals is exactly what we want to see in our Las Vegas ecosystem,” said Jeff Talbot, Roseman’s vice president for research. “In the space of less than two years, you’re seeing a company that’s attracted to the area, gets investment here in Nevada and now it’s going to be benefiting the lives of Nevada patients.

“That’s the dream, and we want to keep doing that over and over again.”

Liu said his company was blown away by the infrastructure at Roseman.

“And then how affordable and how helpful it would be to be able to grow and scale here,” he said. “A lot of companies go overseas to manufacture something because it’s more cost efficient. But we have a lot of IP that’s within the sensors. We don’t want to go overseas.

“There’s a lot of really good talent in Las Vegas that we can train and be able to make the sensors here and keep everything in-house with our manufacturing. … The community here has been really amazing.”

The investment by Desert Forge was one of the first commitments made by the Las Vegas-based venture capital fund, and it was matched by GOED through its Battle Born Growth program.

“We liked it because it represents deep tech, that is, deep technology platforms coming out of university research and development labs,” said Desert Forge managing partner Len Jessup, former UNLV president. “And it’s a technology with great promise to not only ultimately have commercial success but that would be important to people and to the planet.”

Vena Vitals, a late seed stage company getting ready for Series A funding, also has received investments from the likes of Samsung, as well as two of the world’s top accelerators in MedTech Innovator and Y Combinator.

“We have a lot of champions across the country, different physicians,” Liu said. “When they see our data, they get really, really excited because this is something that is really hard to do and it’s so important.

“Let’s say, in a surgery, you could have the surgeon make an incision and maybe they accidentally hit something and the patient is bleeding out, then the blood pressure is tanking. They need to know right away so they can better treat the patient.

“If they’re only getting a cuff every five minutes, a lot can happen in between those five-minute intervals. So it makes a big difference to be able to have continuous data. Especially if they don’t have to do it invasively by stabbing another catheter into the patient.”

Home sleep monitoring

While Vena Vitals’ first application is for hospitals, the second application it plans to launch next year is for home sleep monitoring.

“Home sleep monitoring is actually really important because nearly a billion people worldwide suffer from sleep disorders,” Liu said. “It’s actually as prevalent as cardiovascular disease, but the tools for monitoring sleep are very limited and sleep apnea is severely under-diagnosed. One of the things that we’re able to bring with blood pressure monitoring is to track whenever you have an apneic event.

“We see this as a technology that is so game changing that it’s going to be ubiquitous in the sense that every sleep test is going to require it and every surgery may utilize this.”